The aftershocks of the earthquake that shook the sports trading card business in August when Fanatics swooped in 10 weeks ago to sign deals with major sports leagues and players’ associations continue to be felt. Within the past few weeks, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) parted with Topps for Panini after 36 years and the National Hockey League (NHL) and NHL Players Association renewed their pacts with Upper Deck, which only two years before had signed an “exclusive multi-year” deal with the league. The new agreements presumably are more lucrative for the organizations.

Whether the Fanatics deals – which also short-circuited Topps’ plan to go public — forced a reckoning and reexamining of trading card licensing agreements between sports organizations and their existing trading card licensees isn’t clear.  But it’s apparent that changes are far from complete.

Physical cards have increasingly given way to digital versions with the arrival of NFTs and other formats. The Upper Deck/NHL/NHLPA announcement included the disclosure that “Upper Deck is unveiling the latest extension of e-Pack’s worldwide success with a new patent-pending NFT platform, Evolution™. Evolution is expected to launch this Winter and will allow fans around the globe to collect and trade never-before-seen licensed NFTs. The NHL- and NHLPA-licensed trading card NFTs are expected to be available on the Evolution platform in the future.”

The trading card business was “ripe for change,” says one industry insider, “because there needed to be innovation, and the distribution was such that by the time cards were sold to consumers several bites of the apple had been taken [by distributors and jobbers] and not as much left for the leagues and players.

“Fanatics’ premise was simple: they were successful bringing vertical integration to the apparel business” – principals that could be applied to trading cards – and the leagues and player associations could be “getting a bigger cut. The leagues are going to be investors in some of these agreements rather than just a licensor and now they’re getting a royalty with the normal rights and an equity stake, so they are winning right out of the gate.”

This isn’t the first time that change has roiled the trading card business.  Topps was an early entrant in digital cards, introduced print on demand in 2016, and also launched MLB NFTs last April. And when Upper Deck emerged in 1989 with an expensive, premium-quality baseball card that made the other companies’ products look like 1950’s throwbacks, it jolted a complacent industry accustomed to producing traditional cardboard pictures of ballplayers. And Fanatics, flush with funding, also will likely be on the hunt to either acquire or partner with a card manufacturer, something it currently lacks.